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A Conversation with Dr. Byram Bridle

Supervisor Jim Desmond | April 13, 2021

We sat down with Dr. Byram Bridle, an associate Professor of Viral Immunology, Department of Pathobiology at the University of Guelph.  Here’s the article that we discussed: https://theconversation.com/a-year-of…

July 22, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

The Great Betrayal

By Will Jones • Daily Sceptic • July 21, 2021

Destroy their education. Destroy their jobs and their job prospects. Destroy their social life, their friendships, their mental health. Force them to work long hours at school or in physically demanding jobs in uncomfortable and breath-inhibiting face masks. This is what our country has done to our young people in the past 16 months.

Why? In an attempt (and not a very successful one) to protect a small minority of mostly elderly folk who are particularly vulnerable to one disease while we wait in limbo to develop a vaccine and roll it out to the vulnerable population.

Then do we give them back their freedom? Not at all. Then we move the goalposts, making freedom conditional on more and more people getting the vaccine. Until we make it to so-called ‘Freedom Day’, a month later than originally planned, and Boris Johnson chooses then to tell young people that their freedom to do the things they enjoy will be dependent on receiving a vaccine.

A vaccine that uses experimental technology and was rushed through trials without waiting for the full safety data (trials which will never now conclude as the control groups have been vaccinated). A vaccine, or rather vaccines, which the authorities now acknowledge increase the risk of dangerous blood clotting and heart conditions, particularly in younger people. Vaccines for which there are now more reports of fatalities in the U.S. than all other vaccines put together for the past 30 years.

OpenVAERS

The E.U.’s own infectious disease journal Eurosurveillance has just published a study concluding that, when it comes to the AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clots, “in young adults, the risks were similar or higher than the benefits”.

Bear in mind this is just considering one side effect based on the reported incidence. It doesn’t take into account other side effects and under-reporting.

That’s the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is now discouraged for under 40s in the U.K. Are Pfizer and Moderna vaccines much better? Warnings have recently been added to them that they cause serious heart conditions in some cases. What else might emerge as the data is properly analysed?

The decision whether to take a particular vaccine, given the risk and potential benefit, is a personal one, and we can hardly blame the minority of young adults who appear to be concluding they’d rather take their chances with the virus, from which they’re also likely to get better immunity.

Any kind of threat of withdrawal of benefits for failure to take a medicine, let alone an experimental medicine, undermines informed consent. For that matter, the paucity of information provided on the real risk of side effects and the real age-specific level of benefit undermines informed consent.

Our young people have been betrayed again and again by this Government, which seems to have reached a place where it regards them primarily as vectors of disease who must be coerced into taking the prescribed medicine to make them clean enough to allow out and about. Yet the evidence that the vaccines are particularly good at preventing the spread of infection is patchy at best.

Our leaders should be ashamed of themselves for how they have abused young people and their trust, jeopardised their health and strangled their aspirations.

Sadly, I don’t think enough of them are sufficiently alive yet to the full horror of what has been pointlessly done to them in the last year and a bit to realise how angry they should be. But if they ever do wake up to it, there will be a terrible political reckoning.

July 21, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Keir Starmer Is Self-Isolating Now. I Call Bullshit

By Richie Allen | July 21, 2021

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has gone home to self-isolate this afternoon. The media has been told that one of his children has tested positive for covid.

According to the BBC:

A statement from his office said one of his children tested positive at lunchtime, but Sir Keir was doing daily tests and tested negative this morning.

Sir Keir was in the House of Commons for PMQs earlier. The PM and chancellor are also self-isolating after contact with the health secretary who tested positive.

This is the fourth time Sir Keir has had to self-isolate since the pandemic began. His spokesman said his family will also be self-isolating.

I’ve no proof whatsoever, but I call bullshit. The media has spent much of the past 48 hours discussing the NHS app and “pingdemic.” Millions of people have been pinged by the app and told to go home and isolate. It’s led to total chaos.

Business owners are tearing their hair out as staff shortages threaten the post-lockdown economic bounce. There are widespread reports that millions of younger people are deleting the app from their phones. Nobody wants to be forced into isolation, especially at this time of year.

The managers of the scamdemic, the entire political class and the media, are horrified that so many are deleting the wretched app. Maybe Johnson, Health Secretary Sajid Javid and Labour leader Keir Starmer have been sent to self-isolate to set an example.

You’d be well within your rights to ask me why. Because chaos is their desired outcome. They want to destroy the economy and cause a shortage of food and other products. They want to bankrupt businesses. They want to bankrupt you. Chaos is the plan.

Ordo Ab Chao. Order out of chaos. All roads lead to The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. The people will only accept it when their worlds are turned upside-down.

The public is being manipulated 24/7 by the political class and the media working in tandem. They want you in a perpetual state of agitation and confusion. You become even more suggestible while in that low vibrational state.

There’s no covid now. There’s no threat if there ever was one. People should not be taking instructions from their phones to drop everything and rush home to isolate. It’s tyranny. People seem to be wising up to it and ditching the app. It’s about bloody time.

How convenient then, that the PM and the leader of the opposition party should be pinged and sent home, while at the same time the media is attacking anyone who suggests it’s time to move on and get on with our lives.

July 21, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

Delete NHS App + Stop Getting Tested = Scamdemic Over

By Richie Allen | July 21, 2021

Friends, gammons, countrymen, lend me your shell-likes. Take out your phone. Press your thumb or forefinger on the NHS app. Hold it down for a second. It’ll give you options. Choose delete app. Good job. Now, never take a PCR or lateral flow test again.

Congratulations. You have ended the scamdemic. Go about your business. By the way, it’s not a bad idea to switch off the 24-hour news channels either.

Listening to BBC radio this morning, I was genuinely surprised to learn that a significant proportion of the population is labouring under the misapprehension that keeping the NHS app on their phones is compulsory. It isn’t. It’s entirely voluntary.

Problems arise when you are pinged and then contacted by a track and trace call-centre to inform you that you were in contact with someone who tested positive. At that point you risk being fined if you don’t isolate for the specified time and answer your phone when they call you to confirm that you are complying.

So delete the feckin app! Do it now and stop being tested. How thick do you need to be to have a test when you are healthy? Use your God given brain. It’s a trap.

How can I put it in a way that it is universally understood? Healthy man take test. Test faulty. Test come back positive. Man must isolate. Government say cases rising. Must impose restrictions. People must have jab.

It’s Kafkaesque, but the people still hold all the aces. It’s very simple. Delete the bastard app and tell them to get stuffed when they ask you to have a test. If you haven’t had a jab yet, don’t. You’ll be amazed at how quickly this will go away.

July 21, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

THE CASE FOR IVERMECTIN | CRAIG KELLY MP

Whocomcampaigner |  June 22, 2021

Here is Craig Kelly presenting his evidence of Ivermectin suppression to an empty Australian parliament. This picture illustrates the type of ‘democracy’ that we have in Australia today. The people’s voice is not being heard by our government.

July 21, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Should COVID-19 be a vaccine disease or a childhood disease?

By Christine S Benn & Professor Peter Aaby | BMJ | July 18, 2021

Dear Editor

In the discussion regarding COVID-19 vaccination of children, several aspects seem to be missing.

First, vaccination of children is based on a small Pfizer-sponsored phase 3 trial of 2260 adolescents randomized to BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine or saline. The resulting paper concludes that the vaccine ”had a favorable safety profile”(1). However, based on data presented in supplementary table 2, in the age group 12-15 years, 7/1131 vaccinated vs. 2/1129 unvaccinated had a severe adverse event (1), i.e. a 3-fold increased risk. In the 16-25 years age group presented in the same paper, 9/536 vaccinated vs. 3/561 unvaccinated had a severe adverse event (1), i.e. likewise a 3-fold increased risk. The combined results indicate a 3.28 (95% confidence interval 1.21 to 8.94)-fold increased risk in severe adverse events in the vaccinated adolescents/young adults (2). In absolute numbers, 1 of 100 vaccinated experienced a severe event, vs. 3 of 1000 unvaccinated. Data was not presented by sex.

A protective vaccine can have negative non-specific and sex-differential effects on overall health (3). For instance, a protective measles vaccine had to be withdrawn after being associated with 2-fold higher all-cause mortality for females (4). A partially protective malaria vaccine was recently likewise associated with 2-fold higher female mortality (5). These epidemiological observations indicate that while the vaccines protected against the target disease, they increased the susceptibility to other diseases. In other words, the specific protection came at the price of increased susceptibility to other diseases. This epidemiological phenomenon of negative non-specific effects has been linked to innate immune tolerance (3, 6). Though the number of participants was small, the only study so far of BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine indicates that this vaccine induces innate immune tolerance towards bacterial and viral ligands (7). Thus, protection against COVID-19 could come at the price of increased risk of other infections.

Other pandemic vaccines have later been found out to have caused rare but severe side effects, like Guillain-Barré syndrome in recipients of flu vaccines in 1976, and narcolepsy linked to one brand of swine flu influenza vaccine in 2009(8). None of the phase 3 trials of COVID-19 vaccines were designed to study either non-specific sex-differential effects, or rare but severe long-term side effects (8).

Given the low risk of severe COVID-19 in previously healthy children – none in the Pfizer-sponsored phase 3 trial (1) – it is not clear that vaccine benefits outweigh harm in healthy children.

Second, arguments for vaccinating children include that infection in children could lead to more dangerous variants. Variants of concern have typically been the result of persistent infections in immunocompromised people that can cause the virus to mutate more frequently because the person’s immune system cannot clear the virus as quickly as the immune system of a healthy person (9). Presumably healthy children, who typically have very mild/short-lasting infections, are unlikely to give rise to variants of concern. Noteworthy, individuals, who have had COVID-19 infection, will likely have broad resistance towards SARS-CoV2 variants(10), and thus contribute importantly to herd immunity.

This leads us to the third point: Should COVID-19 be a vaccine disease or a childhood disease? There has been surprisingly little discussion about the future of COVID-19. Many people seem to assume that COVID-19 will become a disease for which we vaccinate the whole population perhaps annually or biannually. This will be expensive – and potentially harmful, if the (repeated) vaccinations have negative effects. We do not think vaccination of the whole population is necessary either; in fact, it may be counter-productive for society.

The known endemic human Corona-viruses (HCoV) infect most people before age 15; thereafter people may become re-infected again, but as evidenced by the lack of IgM responses, the response is a recall response (11). These HCoV rarely cause severe disease until the age of immunosenescence and we would never contemplate vaccinating against HCoVs at the population level, even if vaccines existed.

Given that we are so lucky that SARS-CoV2 very rarely cause severe disease in children, the safest and cheapest way forward seems to be to tame SARS-CoV2 to a common childhood disease like other HCoV. This would happen by allowing SARS-CoV2 to infect children, who thereby likely become protected against severe disease well into late adulthood. Importantly, this transition of SARS-CoV2 into a childhood disease would be delayed if there is too little SARS-CoV2 circulating. As noted by others: “Once most adults are vaccinated, circulation of SARS-CoV-2 may in fact be desirable, as it is likely to lead to primary infection early in life when disease is mild, followed by booster re-exposures throughout adulthood … This would keep reinfections mild and immunity up to date”(12).

In conclusion, there are good arguments why not vaccinating children may in fact serve several purposes at the individual as well as at the societal level:
• Not vaccinating children protects children against the potential unknown harms of COVID-19 vaccinations.
• Not vaccinating children gives them the opportunity to develop a broad natural immunity, contributing to herd immunity, and speeding up the transition of SARS-CoV2 into a childhood disease.
The avoided costs of making COVID-19 a vaccine disease, for which we vaccinate the whole population maybe annually or biannually, could be well spent on other health related issues such as smoking, cancer, obesity, and mental health.

References:

1. Frenck RW, Jr., Klein NP, Kitchin N, Gurtman A, Absalon J, Lockhart S, et al. Safety, Immunogenicity, and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 Covid-19 Vaccine in Adolescents. N Engl J Med. 2021.
2. Benn CS. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christine-stabell-benn_safety-immunogenic…. LinkedIn post 2021.
3. Benn CS, Fisker AB, Rieckmann A, Sørup S, Aaby P. Vaccinology: time to change the paradigm? Lancet Infect Dis. 2020.
4. Aaby P, Jensen H, Samb B, Cisse B, Sodemann M, Jakobsen M, et al. Differences in female-male mortality after high-titre measles vaccine and association with subsequent vaccination with diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and inactivated poliovirus: reanalysis of West African studies. Lancet. 2003;361(9376):2183-8.
5. Klein SL, Shann F, Moss WJ, Benn CS, Aaby P. RTS,S Malaria Vaccine and Increased Mortality in Girls. MBio. 2016;7(2):e00514-16.
6. Blok BA, de Bree LCJ, Diavatopoulos DA, Langereis JD, Joosten LAB, Aaby P, et al. Interacting, Nonspecific, Immunological Effects of Bacille Calmette-Guerin and Tetanus-diphtheria-pertussis Inactivated Polio Vaccinations: An Explorative, Randomized Trial. Clin Infect Dis. 2020;70(3):455-63.
7. Föhse FK, Geckin B, Overheul GJ, van de Maat J, Kilic G, Bulut O, et al. The BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses. medRxiv. 2021:2021.05.03.21256520.
8. Doshi P. Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us. Bmj. 2020;371:m4037.
9. Peacock TP, Penrice-Randal R, Hiscox JA, Barclay WS. SARS-CoV-2 one year on: evidence for ongoing viral adaptation. J Gen Virol. 2021;102(4).
10. Ferretti AP, Kula T, Wang Y, Nguyen DMV, Weinheimer A, Dunlap GS, et al. Unbiased Screens Show CD8(+) T Cells of COVID-19 Patients Recognize Shared Epitopes in SARS-CoV-2 that Largely Reside outside the Spike Protein. Immunity. 2020;53(5):1095-107.e3.
11. Zhou W, Wang W, Wang H, Lu R, Tan W. First infection by all four non-severe acute respiratory syndrome human coronaviruses takes place during childhood. BMC Infect Dis. 2013;13:433.
12. Lavine JS, Bjornstad O, Antia R. Vaccinating children against SARS-CoV-2. BMJ. 2021;373:n1197.

Competing interests: No competing interests

Christine S Benn & Professor Peter Aaby
Bandim Health Project, Department of Clinical Research, University of Southern Denmark
Studiestræde 6, 1455 Copenhagen K, Denmark
@StabellBenn

July 20, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Appellate Court Puts Back in Force CDC’s Vaccine Passports Requirement and Other Mandates on Cruises

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | July 19, 2021

There was some great news last month when the state of Florida won, in a United States district court, a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mandates, including for vaccine passports, under the CDC’s draconian and unprecedented “conditional sailing order” imposed on cruises in the name of countering coronavirus. I provided details about the court decision in an article here.

Unfortunately, late Saturday night — before the district court’s preliminary injunction was set to take effect on Sunday, a panel of three judges of the 11th Circuit decided by a two to one vote to stay the preliminary injunction pending appeal. The appellate court’s decision thus dictates that the CDC’s mandates on cruises, and cruise ship crews and passengers, remain enforceable for the time being.

Responding to news of the appellate court’s decision, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is pledging to continue the fight in the courts to remove the CDC mandates on cruises. In a Monday Orlando Weekly article by Tom Urban and Jim Saunders, DeSantis is quoted as follows:

‘We are absolutely going to pursue getting the stay removed, either at the full 11th Circuit or at the U.S. Supreme Court. I think probably to the full 11th Circuit en banc,’ DeSantis said during an appearance in Central Florida.

En banc consideration would involve all judges of the circuit court weighing in on the matter, a process that could yield a different result than was obtained in the split three judge panel decision.

Further quoted in the Orlando Weekly article, DeSantis expresses optimism that the state of Florida will ultimately be successful in its court battle against the CDC’s mandates for cruises:

‘I think most courts at this point have had their limit of the CDC issuing these dictates without a firm statutory basis,’ DeSantis said. ‘I am confident we’d win on the merits at the full 11th Circuit, and obviously I am confident we would win at the U.S. Supreme Court.’

Hopefully, DeSantis’ prediction of victory proves correct.


Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute.

July 19, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

The BBC vs Donald Trump

By Freddie Attenborough | The Daily Sceptic | July 19, 2021

In March 2021, the BBC reported that one of their investigative teams had, “Been tracking the human toll of coronavirus misinformation”. During this investigation they claimed to have found links to “assaults, arsons and deaths”. Worryingly, experts also told them that, “The potential for indirect harm caused by rumours, conspiracy theories and bad health information could be much worse”. Sounds like an interesting investigation, doesn’t it? Public service output at its finest, you might think. Just the kind of article we’d all like to read.

Alas. Not quite.

The problem with the BBC is that it simply can’t help itself. Having teed an ostensibly interesting story up in this open, investigatory journalistic type of way, its authors then proceed to devote a good-ish chunk of what follows to that most favourite of all BBC pastimes, namely, implicating Donald Trump in the act of mass murder. As with the butterfly so beloved of chaos theory (you know the one: that little blighter who’s always flapping his wings and causing  tsunamis to crash into the coast of Bangladesh) no sooner have the BBC shown us Trump tweeting about the FDA’s preliminary research into hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against Covid than the magic of non-deterministic linear physics kicks in and people all over Nigeria and Vietnam suddenly start mopping up the old bleach-based products like vacuum cleaners.

In the end, then, the only interesting thing about this article is the way it reminds us just how little time and attention the BBC have paid to exploring the link that surely must exist between Covid ‘misinformation’ (as they themselves insist on calling it) and the huge rise in cases of psychosomatic disorder – health anxiety in particular – that we’ve witnessed in the UK since the dawn of the Age of Lockdown (2020-present). Let me explain what I mean.

And to do so, let me start by asking a question: what might disinformation likely to precipitate new, or to heighten existing, levels of anxiety amongst those suffering from psychosomatic disorders look like? How, in other words, might we define such a thing? Well, perhaps we might say that it would be information that unduly exaggerated the risks associated with Covid. Perhaps we might go further and say that it would represent the risks associated with Covid in a highly misleading and/or a sensationalist way. Come to think of it, perhaps we might end up concluding that it would look rather like the BBC’s recent article, ‘Long COVID funding to unearth new treatments.’ Below is the thumbnail picture accompanying the piece.

As you can see, it depicts two masked patients, chaperoned by two masked nurses, who look unmistakably like they’re having to learn how to walk again. (And by the way, anyone who’s going to counter that it could just as plausibly be a depiction of two patients being tested for, say, oxygen carrying capacity or pulse rate during recovery from a respiratory illness like Covid would need to explain to me why it is that neither patient is shown to be wearing any tracking/monitoring equipment, and, in addition, why neither nurse is shown to be holding/studying any data monitors). The male patient in the foreground of the image looks particularly unsteady on his feet, relying heavily on the metal frame surrounding him for bodily support. One of the masked nurses stands next to him, watching his legs and feet intently, presumably scanning for any warning signs of imminent collapse or a stumble. Her right arm is stretching out towards him, and no doubt a guiding/supportive hand is resting on the patient’s shoulder. Just behind the male patient, you can also see the lower half of the wheelchair in which he will have been brought from his hospital ward and into this rehabilitation class.

But if that’s what it shows, then what kind of patient might actually need rehabilitation of this kind; rehabilitation, that is, in which patients are having to learn how to walk again? It’s the type of thing that you’d imagine is normally reserved for patients needing post-surgery rehabilitation; patients who’ve suffered spinal cord injuries, neurological disorders, car-crashes, amputations and the like. That’s big league, serious stuff. We’re essentially talking about a type of rehabilitative treatment for people who’re on the cusp of, or who’re already suffering from, life-changing injuries/illnesses.

So is this the type of treatment that people suffering from Long Covid are likely to need? I ask because as we’ve already established, it’s the type of treatment that’s depicted in the image the BBC have attached to an article entitled, “Long Covid funding to unearth new treatments” the first paragraph of which reads: “Thousands of people with ‘long Covid’ could benefit from the funding of 15 new studies of the condition, its causes and potential treatments”. To help us on the way towards answering this question, here’s what the NHS guide to the symptoms currently associated with ‘Long Covid’ has to say for itself:

Common Long Covid symptoms include:

  • extreme tiredness (fatigue)
  • shortness of breath
  • chest pain or tightness
  • problems with memory and concentration (‘brain fog’)
  • difficulty sleeping (insomnia)
  • heart palpitations
  • dizziness
  • pins and needles
  • joint pain
  • depression and anxiety
  • tinnitus, earaches
  • feeling sick, diarrhoea, stomach aches, loss of appetite
  • a high temperature, cough, headaches, sore throat, changes to sense of smell or taste
  • rashes

Now I’m no doctor, admittedly, but I’m not entirely satisfied that a programme of rehabilitative walking usually reserved for wheelchair bound patients in post-surgery recovery is going to prove particularly efficacious when it comes to the treatment of long Covid patients with earache, diarrhoea and changes of smell or taste. In fact, I’m not satisfied at all.

Indeed it rather seems to me that the BBC’s choice of image, when considered as an accompaniment to this particular article, might justifiably be described as misinformation; that is, as information that unduly exaggerates the risks associated with long Covid in a highly misleading or a sensationalist way.

By the way, do you like my definition of misinformation? Thanks. Perhaps it might interest you, then, to know it’s culled from the BBC’s own editorial guidelines. Specifically, therein we find “Section 3, Accuracy”, and, more particularly, “Sub-section 3.3.24”, which states that, “Reconstructions [which this image undeniably is] are when events are quite explicitly re-staged”, and that in order to abide by the BBC’s editorial guidelines, “They should normally be based on a substantial and verifiable body of evidence… [and they] should not overdramatise in a misleading or sensationalist way”.

On this basis, then, is it not the case that the BBC’s own reality-check team, that bastion of fairness and impartiality in a world gone wrong, should hold the organisation to account for spreading long Covid misinformation? Is it not an article that exaggerates and sensationalises the effects of long Covid? Further, is it not likely to generate additional, or indeed to heighten existing cases of, psychosomatic health disorders in the U.K.?

I guess if you’re the type of person who’s already suffering from heightened worry about your health, about lockdown, about physical contact with others, about viruses, about disease; I guess if you surf the web but never really read anything carefully; if you scan the thumbnails on the BBC’s news homepage but never click through to the articles; if you look at an article’s opening image and then only scan the first two or three paragraphs of text thereafter… then I guess, absolutely, it might indeed be considered ‘misinformation.’

“But isn’t this all just a little pedantic?” I hear you ask. “A bit nit-picky?” Oh, absolutely. And doesn’t it feel good to be playing the BBC at their own game for a change. So good, in fact, that you really must forgive me. I’m enjoying myself so much that I’m going to continue to be pedantic for a little while yet.

Because you see I guess, too, that if you’re prone to experiencing psychosomatic disorders of one kind of another, if you’re already well-known to your local GP surgery and A&E, then it might panic you quite a bit to think that the image the BBC have chosen to use here depicts a fate that might lie in store for you too if you ever contracted Covid and then experienced Long Covid. I guess too that if you’re that way inclined, then you might even feel you needed to take the vaccine, any vaccine, right this minute, no questions asked, jab jab jab, please, put it in me doctor, oh God, put it in me… and to hell with any kind of informed consent.

Jabbed or not, if you’re that way inclined then I guess you might nevertheless see that picture, that image of the Long Covid patient struggling to walk in the BBC’s article, and then, at some point later, get around to thinking that you’re experiencing the symptoms of Long Covid, that you’re really ill, that you’re dying, that you’re in need of immediate and very urgent medical attention, that you’ve got to go to A&E immediately because you might end up in a wheelchair unable to walk; I guess, too, that you might see that picture and then end up yo-yo-ing in and out of the healthcare system for the rest of your life, costing the taxpayer money, wasting valuable medical time, worrying that there’s a direct line of causality that “the science” has established between you coughing, you sneezing and you ending up in hospital needing a wheelchair to get you to your rehabilitative walking therapy sessions.

It’s strange, isn’t it? I mean, the BBC is normally so keen, so eager, to castigate others for disseminating what they’ve decreed to be Covid misinformation capable of causing or exacerbating existing physical disorders. Yet in the case of psychosomatic disorders – i.e. panic, hyperventilating, health anxiety, generalised anxiety, hypertension, depression, chills, gastrointestinal disturbances – they’re curiously reluctant to take up those same sanctimonious ‘fact-checking’ cudgels.

It’s a reluctance that matters, though, isn’t it? The sad and unfortunate thing about psychosomatic disorders is that those suffering from them are more likely than almost any other group in society to place unnecessary pressure on the NHS. After all, if you’re worried that you’re seriously unwell and/or in imminent danger of dying, where’s the first place you’re going to go? That’s right: a primary or secondary healthcare provider. The problem, of course, is that people who suffer from those types of disorders are neither seriously ill nor in imminent danger of dying. What they ‘are’ is suffering from severe anxiety. That’s not nothing, of course; but it’s hardly first responder or A&E type stuff, is it?

That this might constitute a problem during a global pandemic of a mild respiratory illness in which we’ve all been told to put our lives, businesses, careers on hold because the NHS is under massive existential pressure, seems obvious. If the NHS is already clogged up with respiratory tract illness and you then go and add a whole bunch of psychosomatic patients to the mix… well, you’ve got a problem, haven’t you? You’d think the BBC would care about that sort of thing, particularly given the pious, reverent tone it normally adopts when it’s representing the NHS. You’d think they’d want to provide balanced, calm, rational reportage of what was going on; reportage that was clear about the extremely low risk Covid poses to the vast majority of people in this country.

I wonder. Could it be that if we were to widen the scope of the concept of ‘misinformation’ to include not only information capable of causing physical harm, but also that likely to cause psychosomatic harm, we’d be forced to conclude that the BBC, with all its Covid exaggerations, its hyperbole, its uncritical, unreflexive treatment of “the science” handed down to it by SAGE, its failure to hold the Government to account, to approach statistics sceptically, to put case numbers into perspective, its obsession with filming death porn reports from inside hospitals (etc etc)… if we were to consider all of that as misinformation too, might we not end up concluding that the BBC has done as much damage to the psychological health and wellbeing of the nation it purports to inform, educate and entertain as Donald Trump ever did with his tweety-tweety chit-chat about preliminary research into hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against Covid? I wonder indeed.

Dr Freddie Attenborough is a former academic. You can see his substack account here.

July 19, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

COVID-19 Mortality Rate Among Children Is Even Lower Than Previously Thought

By Noah Carl • Daily Sceptic • July 19, 2021

We’ve known since the early weeks of the pandemic that age is the single best predictor of COVID-19 mortality, and that the risk of death for young people is vanishingly small.

letter in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that zero Swedish children aged 1–16 died of COVID-19 up to the end of June 2020. And only 15 were admitted to the ICU, of whom four had a serious underlying health condition.

Of course, England is a much larger country than Sweden, and it’s been a whole other year since those Swedish data were collected. So how many English children have died of COVID-19?

In an unpublished study, Clare Smith and colleagues sought to identify the number of COVID-19 deaths among people aged under 18 between March 2020 and February 2021. They examined data from the National Child Mortality Database, which was linked to testing data from Public Health England and comorbidity data from national hospital admissions.

The structure of their dataset allowed the authors to distinguish deaths that were plausibly from COVID-19 and deaths that were merely with COVID-19.

3,105 under 18s died from all causes in England during the relevant time period. 61 of these involved people who had tested positive for the virus. However, the authors determined that only 25 were actually caused by COVID-19. And of the 25, 76% had a serious underlying health condition.

Given that an estimated 469,982 under 18s were infected with the virus up to February of 2021, the survival rate in this age-group (the inverse of the IFR) was 99.995%. What’s more, 99.2% of total deaths were caused by things other than COVID-19.

Smith and colleagues’ findings underline just how small a risk COVID-19 poses to young people, and hence – I would argue – why a focussed protection strategy was preferable to blanket lockdowns.

As early as 10th April 2020, Martin Kulldorff – co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration – published an article on LinkedIn titled ‘COVID-19 Counter Measures Should be Age Specific’.

Based on the data that were then available, he estimated one would need to stop 3.5 million children being exposed in order to prevent the same number of deaths as one could prevent by shielding 1,000 people in their 70s. He argued, therefore, that COVID counter-measures must vary by age.

A similar argument was made by George Davey Smith and David Spiegelhalter in a piece for The BMJ last May. These authors called for “stratified shielding”, while noting that this would “require a shift away from the notion that we are all seriously threatened by the disease”.

According to the medical researcher Russell Viner, who spoke to Nature, “There’s a general feeling among paediatricians that probably too many children were shielded during the first wave”. And the epidemiologist Elizabeth Whittaker said that efforts to shield children “have probably caused more stress and anxiety for families than benefit.”

In addition to “stress and anxiety”, there’s also the learning losses associated with months of online teaching. All this compared to the marginal impact closing schools had on the spread of COVID-19.

When we look back at the response to COVID, serious questions will have to be asked about the costs of lockdown, not only to society in general, but to young people in particular.

July 19, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The WHO Declares all PCR Tests at High CT to be Potentially 100% False Positives

By Judy Wilyman PhD | Vaccine Decisions | July 13, 2021

In December 2020 the WHO declared that any result from a RT-PCR test that was amplified at a high cycle threshold (CT) e.g. above 35 CT is potentially 100% false positive.  This leads us to question all the reported ‘cases’ of COVID19 disease  in Australia in 2020. This is because Australia has reported that it uses this PCR test at a CT of 40-45  and most of the reported ‘cases’ were people without symptoms. 

The question now is ‘What cycle threshold is the Australian government using in 2021?’ Has it been reduced at the same time as the vaccine was introduced to give the appearance that the vaccine has caused a decline in the cases of this disease?

The WHO says that in 2021 a manual readjustment of the PCR positivity threshold must be done to account for background noise in specimens with high cycle thresholds. 

There is no transparency in the use of this test that is now allowing government’s globally to claim that healthy people, without disease symptoms, are an asymptomatic case of disease. This also enables the government to claim that healthy people are a risk to society. This is criminal and this PCR test is not a diagnostic tool for any disease.

Many doctors and scientists are stating this and they are being ignored and censored. Here is the inventor of the test, Kary Mullis, also stating ‘it is not a diagnostic test‘. It should never be used when symptoms are not also present.

Traditionally doctors were taught to diagnose disease on a collection of symptoms and the PCR test was sometimes a supportive, but not a diagnostic, tool. This has all changed in 2020 to be able to claim that healthy people are now the cause of these diseases and this has been achieved without having to provide any supportive evidence for this claim.

In addition, it is these ‘cases’ that have been used by the government to enact the emergency powers. Yet the definition of a pandemic that is based on an increase in ‘cases’ of a disease has not been validated by the scientific community. It is not a scientific definition if it has not been validated by the community of scientists – not just elite individuals.

The case-tracing of healthy people with QR codes is fraudulent and it is enabling more ‘cases’ of disease to be obtained and more people to be locked up and falsely declared a ‘case’ of disease. This is industry-pseudoscience and it has all come about because the WHO allowed a small group of individuals, with financial conflicts of interest with industry, to adopt an unscientific definition of a ‘global pandemic’. 

This makes the use of the emergency powers invalid and all the directives that have been enacted to control this non-pandemic of a flu-like illness. Please read the full article describing the unscientific definition of a pandemic that has been used by governments and also watch the interview with Elizabeth Hart on Asia Pacific Today. This interview describes the full extent of the Australian government’s conflicts of interest in promoting an untested drug in the population. She also describes the complicity of the mainstream media and research institutions in this fabricated and well planned ‘pandemic’ event.

This crime against the population has also been perpetuated by governments deliberately suppressing the treatments for respiratory viruses that are known to be beneficial. Here is Craig Kelly presenting his evidence of this suppression in an empty Australian parliament. This picture illustrates the type of ‘democracy’ that we have in Australia today. The people’s voice is not being heard by our government.

In this video, Dr. David Martin explains to the International Criminal Court that there was nothing novel about the 2019 coronavirus. This is because it had been patented between 2008 – 2017 under gain of function research carried out in the US and in Wuhan, China. In addition, the fact that it was a mutated coronavirus means that humans would be expected to have some previous immunity to this virus because these are  a family of common respiratory viruses that cause the common cold.

It is now clear that this is a ‘pandemic’ in name only. This is why there is no evidence of enormous numbers of deaths and illness in the community. The WHO could not have declared this to be a ‘global pandemic’ in 2020, if the definition of a pandemic had not been changed in 2009.

The ‘cases’ of disease that the media is presenting are healthy people who have had a PCR test but have no symptoms. It is these cases in healthy people that are being used to close borders and quarantine healthy people. This is a media campaign using statistics out of context to encourage the community to accept the governments new regulations that restrict our fundamental rights and freedoms, ultimately harming our health and wellbeing.

July 19, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Is the Delta variant spreading only in highly vaccinated countries? No.

Does Delta spread only in vaccinated countries? No. (Corona Realism)
Swiss Policy Research | July 18, 2021

A highly viral tweet by “Corona Realism” is making the following claim: “Something really odd is going on: In Europe we are seeing surges at many places where most of the population has already been vaccinated. At the same time, the 15 least vaccinated countries don‘t seem to face any problem. At some point, denying this problem will get painful.”

In reality, the “least vaccinated countries” shown above are simply the Eastern European countries, whose infection cycle has always been delayed compared to Western Europe. They already missed the first spring wave in 2020, which led to the notorious misinterpretation that they were protected by (useless) face masks. Back then, the chief pathologist of Bulgaria famously claimed that covid was a hoax; today, Bulgaria has one of the highest covid death rates in Europe. Vaccination rates in Eastern Europe are lower than in Western Europe primarily for economic reasons.

To make the deception work, “Corona Realism” had to leave out some highly vaccinated countries in Eastern Europe (notably Hungary, Poland and Czechia), whose infection rates are as low as in the rest of Eastern Europe; and he had to leave out the many countries with a low vaccination rate severely affected by Delta, notably Russia as well as many Asian and even African countries. In fact, in many countries with a low vaccination rate, Delta covid deaths have reached an all-time record level.

In conclusion, while many “public health experts” got almost everything wrong during the covid pandemic, skeptics should remain careful not to fall for some of the same fallacies.

See also“Vaccine failure”? Not really. (updated section on several false claims)

Figure: Delta deaths in some Southeast Asian countries

Delta deaths in some Southeast Asian countries with a low vaccination rate.

Delta deaths in some Southeast Asian countries (OWD)

See also:

July 19, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

I’ve Absolutely No Obligation To The So-Called Vulnerable

By Richie Allen | July 19, 2021

The vulnerable are out in force this morning. Today is July 19th. It’s Freedom Day apparently. The government has removed the legal requirement to wear a mask and to maintain social distancing. The vulnerable are worried.

BBC Breakfast and SKY News have been speaking to vulnerable people this morning. These are people with various illnesses that have left them immunosuppressed. They’re not happy about opening up, at least the ones on tv and radio this morning.

One young woman who has aplastic anemia, told SKY’s Kay Burley that the removal of restrictions puts her in danger. She said that people who ditch their masks today, are selfish.

Last week, a man called in to LBC radio to say that his wife was recovering from cancer and that she was vulnerable. He said that as she needed to use the underground to commute, people should continue to wear face coverings on her behalf and on behalf of other vulnerable people.

I had a heated argument with a wheelchair-bound woman in May of last year. Don’t laugh. It wasn’t my finest hour. The woman has cerebral palsy. She works for a local company. I like her, but we got into it over lockdown.

As she saw it, I had a moral responsibility to stay indoors as much as I could tolerate, to lessen her chances of catching covid-19. She said that I was selfish and irresponsible for doing as I liked and not wearing a mask.

I asked her if she was prepared to engage in a bit of quid pro quo and help me pay my mortgage. She looked at me as if I’d gone mad. Game over. By the way, when I say heated, I don’t mean shouting and swearing. It was a robust exchange.

I bet you that most so-called vulnerable folk couldn’t name their next door neighbours if you asked them. I bet you their eyes would glaze over if you asked them when was the last time they had a neighbour over for dinner.

Funny that isn’t it? Those who are demanding that strangers turn their lives upside-down so that they can feel protected, most probably couldn’t give a shit about the people who live around them.

It’s crazy when you really think about it. How dare you ask people to commit financial suicide and incidentally, make themselves physically and mentally unwell, so that you can feel safe? How bloody dare you insist that people have a potentially deadly injection just because you can’t?

If you want to live in perpetual fear and choose to view your fellow citizens as biological weapons, then have at it. That’s your personal choice. But I won’t indulge your fantasy.

Neither will I commit self harm to assuage your irrational fears. I owe you nothing. I have no obligation to you whatsoever.

I’m a very good neighbour. My philosophy is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I turn my music off at 8pm. I turn down the telly. Our dog is trained, meaning that she is quiet. I’m out and about at dawn, when most people are in bed. I don’t make a sound.

I do not engage in any activity that has a negative impact on others. I am selfless by nature.

But I will not wear a facemask in public, just in case there is an immunosuppressed person nearby. Nor will I confine myself to my home. That is preposterous. I accept no responsibility for your wellbeing whatsoever, the exception being when I am behind the wheel of my car.

If you’re unfortunate enough to be so ill that you are vulnerable to infection, you have my genuine sympathy. But tough shit Paddy. Those are the breaks. That’s life. You and you alone are responsible for your health. If you think it’s a bit too risky to go outside or jump on a train, you act accordingly. But don’t expect me to walk on eggshells for the rest of my life. It ain’t a rehearsal you know.

July 19, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment